Johannesburg, 07 Aug 2023
Voys Reach: the name of this breakthrough new feature says it all. It automatically connects your customer directly with your company’s colleague he or she spoke to last. When your business number is called, the system detects the historical relationship between caller and colleague/s in order to expedite the call and optimise the results.
It then integrates with Voys Pulse – another standard Freedom feature – to check the availability of the relevant colleagues. Based on this information, Voys Reach connects the customer directly to the correct colleague. The immediate benefit is that there are significantly fewer transfers and briefer calls. Customers are helped faster, which means they save time and money, which, in turn, allows businesses to build more valuable customer relationships.
Game-changer
Voys Reach is one of the latest and greatest features of Freedom, the award-winning business telephony system built by Voys. After many months of intensive design, development and testing, Reach has been deployed as a staple feature for all Freedom users. It sets Voys apart from the pack in emphatic fashion as Freedom is the only proprietary cloud-based business PBX on the South African market that boasts this remarkable innovation as a basic component, the company says.
Reach can be described as “intelligent routing” or “smart order of ringing”, for that is exactly what it does. By astutely using stored call data, it connects your customers’ calls to the colleague/s they are most likely trying to call.
New standard in customer service
Reach also qualitatively enhances conversations and makes them more personal. For example, the customer onboarding process is optimised by directing a new customer’s calls to the same colleague throughout the customer journey, ensuring a single touchpoint for onboarding. If the colleague overseeing the onboarding is unavailable, the call is offered to other colleagues in a particular call group. This way your customer always gets to speak to someone in the know.
Voys Reach is a boon to various types of organisations for various reasons. For budget-conscious businesses, Voys Reach replicates certain functionalities of a CRM. For businesses and organisations whose relationships with clients are particularly personal or sensitive, Voys Reach ensures that those who call on a regular basis are automatically directed to the colleague or colleagues they have been in contact with most regularly or recently.
Tech behind the tool
For those of a hi-tech bent curious about the development process, the code that drives Voys Reach was written in the Python programming language. A great deal of experimenting with variables and tweaking weightings was undertaken to determine the optimal code for the feature. Since all Voys code is open source, there are no trade secrets here.
Speaking of which, the dev team incorporated an open source agglomerative clustering algorithm to employ a triaging process to determine, in descending order, the likeliest destination for inbound calls. This was obtained from Scikit-learn, an open source data science package that’s the gold standard for machine learning (ML) in the Python ecosystem.
Open source messaging system NATS was also integrated into the code for incoming call data, while the open source FastAPI was employed to apply Reach to outgoing call data. However, the vast majority of the code for the feature was written by Voys so the company can continue to evolve, extend and customise it.
Method behind the magic
For the creation of the Voys Reach feature on the Freedom platform, the Voys developers implemented an innovative combination of the methodologies of domain-driven design, infrastructure as code (IAC) and DevOps to obtain optimal results.
Applying the principles of domain-driven design allows for the creation of multidisciplinary teams that elide traditional distinctions between front-end developers, back-end developers and domain experts. The result is the elimination of silos, which increases efficiency and creates a common language for building the ideal features for the system.
Because DevOps integrates and automates the work of software development and IT operations as a means for improving and shortening the systems development life cycle, the team was able to increase development speed via the smart use of libraries and packages.
Finally, elements of the infrastructure as code methodology were applied so that the process of managing data centres is conducted through machine-readable definition files as opposed to physical hardware configuration or interactive configuration tools. This increases the flexibility of the system and the independence of the user.
Human touch
Voys Reach is a feature of Freedom that is particularly pertinent in the South African context. Research unequivocally indicates that, in Mzansi, the phone call is king. The evidence overwhelmingly indicates that the majority of customers contacting a service provider far prefer speaking to a knowledgeable human to sending e-mails or conversing with chatbots.
Reach is a reflection of Voys’ commitment to continually upgrade, update, innovate and improve the Freedom platform in order to consistently add value to South African businesses. With Reach as a powerful new string in its bow, Freedom continues to empower South African companies to optimise their customer communications. This in turn boosts these business’s ability to delight their own customers and build increasingly meaningful customer relationships.
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